Diana Elder and Nicole Elder Dyer do a fabulous job with their process called Research Like a Pro. I’ve been a fan for a long time and have all their books.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and, while I’ve embraced much of what it can provide genealogy researchers, I will admit that I’m not a fan of AI doing my writing for me, even with me editing the product. Absolutely ZERO of my 15 years of blog posts have been written with AI.

I do love its capabilities to help with reading and indexing documents, helping develop research plans and using the various AI products as sophisticated online search engines.

However, I detest those AI-created images. I’m much rather see historical photos or no image at all unless the posts are all about using AI. Then, they are fine.

Having said that, even though I’m definitely a senior citizen, I do want to stay on top of the latest research tools and techniques so I’ve decided to try out Diana’s and Nicole’s Research Like a Pro with AI Genealogy Workbook.

Instead of doing a straight book review, I am going to work on each chapter in the workbook and then write about my experience and add my thoughts.

To begin, if you aren’t familiar with Diana’s and Nicole’s work, they host Family Locket, and provide genealogy education through podcasts, courses, books and genealogy talks.

Research Like a Pro with AI Genealogy Workbook is available to purchase on the website as a digital download for $39.99. I made the purchase and then printed out the workbook and put the pages in a softcover plastic notebook. This is just an aside, but for those who do want a printed copy, I love that they had downloadable images for a front and back cover, in color, which I used.

I also save paper by printing out the workbook with all odd numbered pages first, flipped the paper over in the printer, and then did all the even numbered pages. I wasn’t sure that the pages would come out in the correct order since I had to manually switch to the back side of the paper, but the workbook printed perfectly.

What sorts of activities will I be doing?

The workbook has a very detailed Table of Contents, but here are just the chapter titles:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction to AI Tools for Genealogy
Chapter 2: Using AI to Formulate a Research Objective
Chapter 3: Using AI for Timeline Creation and Analysis
Chapter 4: Using AI for Citations
Chapter 5: Using AI for Locality Research
Chapter 6: Using AI in Research Planning
Chapter 7: Using AI in Research Logging
Chapter 8: Using AI in Report Writing
Chapter 9: Embracing AI in Your Genealogical Research Process

Index

Where does my own skill level fall in terms of using AI?

I’ve attended quite a few online webinars on the basics of using AI and have tried out each of the main AI products with a preference for ChatGPT. However, I have not upgraded to any paid services.

I’m proficient at using FamilySearch full-text search and have used AI to help find resources to created a locality guide, which I did by hand. AI was an afterthought because I wanted to see if it could find other websites, books, etc., that would be useful.

While I’ve used timelines often, I created them myself in Word or Excel and my research logs are usually notes I add to my genealogy software.

I’d say I’m about in the intermediate range when it comes to my AI skills – not a beginner, but most definitely not an expert user, which is why trying out the process is intriguing to me.

I also think that by committing myself to blogging about my efforts, I’m more likely to stick with the process until I complete Chapter 9.

Coming up – my experience with Chapter 1: Introduction to AI Tools for Genealogy.